Lenovo updates their T60 and R60 line with Santa Rosa, X60 Tablet PC next in line?

Lenovo just announced that they have updated the popular T60 and R60 line of ThinkPads with Santa Rosa, as well as introducing some new features.

Take a look at these improvements to the R and T series, and I believe this paints a picture for what we will end up seeing in the X60 Tablet PC. This is only speculation on my part, but from what they are saying about heat due to Santa Rosa, BIOS port enhancements, and their new Battery Stretch technology (which is a good move in the right direction ), it only makes sense that at least some of these enhancements will make their way to the X60 Tablet PC.

Both the T61 and the R61 are our coolest running systems EVER. Santa Rosa, while faster, also puts out more heat no matter whose system it runs on. We’ve seen the total amount of heat generated by Santa Rosa vs. a Napa system increase by over 20%. We expect our competition to run hotter on your lap. In contrast, our ThinkPads will actually drop their average surface temperatures by several degrees.

At the same time, these will also be our quietest running systems EVER. We’re not running the fan faster to remove more heat. We’ve redesigned it to be more silent than ever before. We’ve also added additional cooling vents on the bottom of the system to allow more airflow.

These are the most protected ThinkPads EVER. We’ve had a Roll Cage protecting the bottom of the system, but that only protected half of the notebook. We’re adding a Roll Cage to the display on our T61s and our 14.1Ã¢â‚¬Â³W R61. This will serve multiple purposes. It will make our systems more impact resistant to pressure on the top of the display and more resistant to the airline seat pushing back on top of your display syndrome. It will also improve our wireless performance significantly. The neatest part is that adding the Display Roll Cage is essentially weight-neutral. Here’s a composite photo of our T61 14.1Ã¢â‚¬Â³ showing what the inside of a system looks like.

These are going to be the most secure ThinkPads ever. We’ll introduce full data encrypting hard disk drives as an option. Also, we’re adding the ability to turn off individual ports in BIOS so that IT has more control for locking down the system.

We’re introducing Battery Stretch technology. The idea behind this is that there are times when your battery only shows 1:32 left, and you really need 2:05 to watch that movie. Battery Stretch will add additional capabilities onto our ThinkPad Power Manager to allow you to shut down individual subsystems that you are not using in order to get that extra battery boost you need. I’ll be honest, you’re not going to go from a battery that has 15 minutes left to suddenly having 3:05, but depending on how it’s configured, you may be able to gain those extra few minutes of productivity (or movie watching).

These will be the best performing ThinkPads ever. We’ll have Intel’s Turbo Memory available as an option on some systems. This is flash memory located inside the system which will definitely help with performance and will also give you a few minutes extra battery life per charge. For now we won’t be using hybrid hard disk drive technology. We’re underwhelmed with the performance available currently with hybrid HDDs and didn’t see any real performance boost.